Creativity, passion drive Halima’s baking business

Halima Adeniji is the entrepreneur behind ‘Cakes on Point’, a Nigerian start-up that provides outdoor and indoor baking services across Lagos and its environs.

Her passion for baking and the success of her mother, who is also a baker, inspired Halima to establish Cakes on Point in 2015.

The young entrepreneur started baking at the age of 13. Her mother owned a baking shop then and Halima usually went there daily after school to assist her.

To learn more about baking, Halima took up a job with a confectionary company to improve her skills immediately after her tertiary education.

Working for some years helped the young entrepreneur to save some money, which she eventually used in establishing the business.

“I got my inspiration from my mum because she knows how to bake and also sells baking items. When I was younger, each time I went to her shop, all I wanted to do was to look at cake catalogues and imagine how making cakes would be like,” Halima recalls.

“I started my business really small. I worked for a cake company before I decided to start my own. Every month, after collecting my salary, I would save half of it, buy one or more baking equipment and, gradually, I was able to start my owing baking business,” she says.

The computer scientist-turned- entrepreneur tells Start-Up Digest that her business has grown well since starting and has continued to stay afloat owing to the excellent services she renders to her clients, who in turn recommend the business to others.

“I ensure that I satisfy my customers so that they can always come back and refer others to me,” the young baker says.

She explains that her ability to maintain creativity in the business has been a strong success point. “You need creativity to be relevant in the baking business. We have a lot of bakers and what has helped me over the years is my creativity,” she says.

The young entrepreneur points out that she sources her raw materials for baking from local markets across the country. “I source my raw materials for baking locally.”

Speaking on the challenge confronting her business, Halima tells Start-up Digest that lack of finance was the greatest challenge that hurt her business its early stage.

According to her, it made it difficult for early set-up of the business, as she was unable to secure enough funds for business registration and proper financing.

She urges the federal government to provide adequate grants and loan opportunities to youths with entrepreneurship minds, stating that a lot of youth with wonderful business ideas are yet to go commercial owing to inadequate funds to finance their businesses.

Apart from finance, Halima also says that high cost of food items and inadequate power supply are two major challenges confronting her business now.

She states that adequate power supply is the backbone of any economy, calling on the government to ensure adequate supply of power for start-ups and businesses to survive.

When asked what her advice to other entrepreneur would be, Halima says, “Do what you know how to do best. There are going to be hard times but never give up ,dream big ,aim high ,pray very hard , work hard and success is yours.”

Josephine Okojie